Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday December 06, 2010 @10:10PM
from the merge-those-benjamins-back-upstream dept.

Thinkcloud writes with a followup to recent news that Mozilla is once again looking into a do-not-track mechanism after having previously killed a similar tool, allegedly under pressure from advertisers. Canonical COO Matt Asay wrote in The Register that this is not necessarily the case, nor is Mozilla's decision necessarily the wrong one. "It's quite possible — indeed, probable — that the best way for Mozilla to fulfill its mission is precisely to limit the openness of the web. At least a bit. Why? Because end-users aren't the only ones with rights and needs online, a point Luis Villa elegantly made years ago. It's not a one-way, free-for-all for end-users. Advertisers, developers and enterprises who employ end-users among others all factor into Mozilla's freedom calculus. Or should." OStatic adds commentary that "Like it or not, commercial open source companies are still companies, and the economics of the online world have everything to do with their present and their future.

Tracking users without their consent is just evil. In no other medium are ad recipients tracked: Not in TV, not in print magazines, not on billboards.If they are tracked in other marketing efforts (eg. loyalty cards), the consumers gave their consent first.

I'm not sure explicit consent is required as much as a singular, easy-to-find method of opting out.

It should be created in a way that doesn't cause websites to freeze or browsers to crash. If a website wants to require tracking in exchange for displaying content, that is their right, however the current state of things web apps just fail and crash and generally don't behave correctly when cookies aren't enabled or JavaScript is disabled.

This is the very thing Mozilla (and the W3C) need to lead the charge on. No closed source company is going to push for this. In fact, this seems like part of why Firefox was created. IE had a hegemony on the market and it was harming to end users that they didnt protect privacy, implement standards, and was generally bloaty and insecure. If Mozilla cant hold true to their mission, perhaps it's time to fork it.

If you mean tracking (not advertising), I'd have to agree. Though in reality they'll just make sure you've somehow agreed to it via some long-winded legalese somewhere and the opt-out mechanism will only be enforced with be a cookie in your browser. Next time you clear cookies or use a different browser (or device), you've effectively opted back in.

This is how tracking opt-out worked with Wide Open West's (Cable ISP) tracking.

I'm not sure explicit consent is required as much as a singular, easy-to-find method of opting out.

A very important addendum to opting out is that it needs to actually be opting out from being tracked.To the best of my knowledge, all of the various tracker-specific "opt out" methods do not stop them from tracking you.All they do is stop them from showing you advertisements based on the tracking information that they still collect.You aren't really opting out from being tracked, you are opting out from being reminded that you are being tracked.

If Mozilla cant hold true to their mission, perhaps it's time to fork it.

Not a bad idea at this point...in the tech industry it's a natural cycle for David to become the next Goliath, but luckily with FOSS it's easy to reset that cycle at any time. Privacy-oriented forks of Firefox and Chrome would become overnight sensations with the geek community, and the knowledge will trickle down from there (and it really does work to some extent with knowledge, not like money).

Everytime we talk about pirating copyright material, people on this site go up in arms about how we are now in the digital age and companies should learn to catch up with the times. "What was fine for older mediums, is no necessarily adequate for the digital age," we say, "Companies should changes their business models accordingly."Given that, your comparison to older mediums and their inability to track users is irrelevant. I do not say I agree to all this tracking, but comparison to "older business models

I agree with that, and I wouldn't want to generalize one claim to all possible arguments. However, in these 2 issues I see some parallels that, I believe, allow me to state what I said in my previous post.

What if you have an employee that you pay to say learn programming languages and write code. The employee tells you they didn't make any progress on projects this week because they spent their time learning. Do you as an employer have a right to know if the user spent 30 hours in non-work related websurfing?

Technically looking over your employee's shoulder is tracking them without consent. However, I agree if an employer wants to track their emplyees they should make a clear a policy saying, "What you

I agree, but the do-not-track approach makes exactly as much sense as having computers send a do-not-hack message.

I think the proper approach is to:

1. Strictly limit, control and obfuscate information sites are able to collect about browsers. Sites have no right or need to know what OS you're running or your CPU architecture. They don't need to know exactly what browser you're running down to the build number and branding. They don't need to know your screen resolution, only the window size. Maybe there sho

That is to say, commercialising a project can be done without spoiling the software.

In the 80s, distributing tapes was one model. Teaching classes is another model (which RMS also did for GCC). In the 90s, service companies sprung up.

Commerce isn't inherently bad. But it's also not inherently necessary.

Advertising funds such a tiny amount of free software development, we shouldn't worry about losing it. There are other business models. Ones which rely on doing something useful which people choose to pay for.

Other business models work for certain products. It hasn't been viable to charge money for a browser since the 1990's. No one is going to take a browser training course. No one needs to hire an enterprise browser deployment specialist.

the best way for Mozilla to fulfill its mission is precisely to limit the openness of the web. At least a bit. Why? Because end-users aren't the only ones with rights and needs online

Sometimes I think: fine. All the commercial entities can take the net and turn it into nothing but a big shopping mall with everyone's computer being nothing but a terminal with which they can deposit cash into somebody's pocket. Except for me, and others like me who understand what it was like to a run Fidonet node. For the hell of it, and for free. And I'm sure there's plenty of younger folks who just get tired of this stuff as well. Hell, I'm sure they could do it better than we did back in the day......

Sometimes I think: fine. All the commercial entities can take the net and turn it into nothing but a big shopping mall with everyone's computer being nothing but a terminal with which they can deposit cash into somebody's pocket. Except for me, and others like me who understand what it was like to a run Fidonet node. For the hell of it, and for free. And I'm sure there's plenty of younger folks who just get tired of this stuff as well. Hell, I'm sure they could do it better than we did back in the day......

Allow me to be one of the 'younger folk'.
I agree that it can get damn annoying sometimes, flash advertisements and popup-spam come to mind. But in the end making, hosting, and maintaining a website does cost money. And no service is free. Instead of paying with your money, you pay for websites with your attention. If the 'cost' of privacy violation is too high (facebook), I wont participate. However if the service provided is useful and the adds/privacy isn't too bad (Google, Slashdot, etc.) I'll participate. I think the Canonical COO has a point, we as end consumers don't usually think about the people who have to fund the hardware that makes the web possible. I certainly hope their is some money to be made in the computer industry, or all this money I paid for college will be moot.

If the ads get too annoying I will tell my computer not to fetch them (blocking tools).

If that's not acceptable to the content providers, they are free not to serve me their content and I'm happy with their decision. It's a deal I'm perfectly happy with and I consider it in no way cutting off my nose to spite my face. The price of the implied contract is too high, neither party wants to enter into it.

I'm prepared to put up with some advertising, just not most of the flash stuff.

The price of the implied contract is too high, neither party wants to enter into it.

I think the root of the problem is that we do not have any other currency besides ad impressions. None of the "electronic cash" and micropayment ventures have taken root, so advertising has become the defacto micropayment system.

I think that if we had a practical "electronic cash" system that was reasonably anonymous with effectively no per-transaction cost we would see the end of a lot of advertising on the net. I think that many people would be happy to pay $5-$20 per month for all of the websites that

If that's not acceptable to the content providers, they are free not to serve me their content and I'm happy with their decision. It's a deal I'm perfectly happy with and I consider it in no way cutting off my nose to spite my face. The price of the implied contract is too high, neither party wants to enter into it.

If you look at the escalating war between ads and ad-blockers, it's obvious people want to see sites without ads that the owners don't want to offer without ads. Very few sites allow you to opt out of their advertising, that your ad blocker works is much the same way you can buy a newspaper and have someone go over it with a magic marker blacking out all the ads before you read it. It can be done, but the newspaper producer obviously doesn't want you to. It is rather disingenuous to say that "because they s

1. My browser has to request the ads separately, I wish to disable this behaviour. It's nothing like buying a newspaper and blanking bits out. It is (largely) active content that takes my bandwidth and resources to run, as well as annoying me.

2. Some sites already block people that block their ads.

I do agree that it's dubious at best to engage in any sort of arms race here. But here's the thing, at a fundamental level serving a page is something they do, actively, at my request

I actually have 4 things to say about ads:1. ads - I'm kind of ok with that in general, people building websites got to eat2. tracking, datamining, history sniffing - I'm NOT ok with that3. busy attention grabbing ads which almost make it impossible to actually read the content - I'm NOT ok with that4. ads which are related to the content - I'm very much ok with that. This probably makes the most sense, I'll be most likely to click on them

> If the ads get too annoying I will tell my computer not to fetch them (blocking tools).

The honest thing to do, if you find the ads on a website too annoying, is not to visit that website again. If you continue to want to use the website in question but block the adverts, you're using a service they provide to you (at their cost) without in effect paying for it.

But publishers have to realise they can get what they want without intrusive advertising. It's only an arms race between advertisers to grab you

I should also point out for the sake of completeness that I do have google ads on my site as well, but to be honest they're proving pretty ineffective as a way of generating revenue, and I'll probably drop them.

Your site sounds fine to me. I'm a reactive ad blocker rather than a proactive one.Annoy me with flash or sound and I will block ads. It's also quite likely I won't come back to your site.

Make ads in context and inoffensive and I'll leave them be. Here's the problem though - any money you get from me loading the ads is probably pretty inconsequential. And I don't click on them. Ever. I'm generally not interested in new opportunities to hand over my credit card details online.

There's always money to be had, but everything doesn't always have to be about money. As I say in my post just above to the GP here, I was around in those BBS days he remembers. You can actually do something that provides other people with a service and costs you time and money without trying to make money off of it and just do it because it's fun. Back in the day even actual businesses did that sometimes. There was a great BBS that was completely free run by the newspaper back in my home town. It had a bunch of registered doors, IRC style chat, etc. and no advertising at all, not even for themselves that I can remember. It wasn't about money, tracking users, spreading their name, etc. Just providing something cool and fun for the community.

But in
the end making, hosting, and maintaining a website does cost money.

Sure, about a hundred dollars per year, more or less. That's pocket change
for most people in the developed world, less than a year's worth of lattes at starbucks.

Moreover, if you don't insist on being the *only one* making your content available to the public, then you can always find others who are willing to mirror your content for free (that's on the 0.01% chance that your content becomes wildly popular).

How do you get rewarded for the time you spent making the interesting
content? Or do you have to do this only as a hobby and have a real paying job
on the side?

Get your priorities straight. You don't care about running websites for the hell of it, you care about making money and you're only tangentially interested in running a website because you think that can make you the money you crave.

Good for you, but it's off the thread topic. The comment I was responding to
claimed that running websites fo

Get the hell off your lawn? I was hoping to come hang out and have a beer with another ex-BBS sysop. We hadn't gotten fidonet set up on ours when it finally died (a storm killed the modem on the first day of a 2 week vacation of the guy who's house the computer was in... lost just about all of our users), but there was still the paying for phone lines, a computer dedicated to the BBS, door registration, and so on. All with no requirement for users to pay up. Just because it was fun and cool to do.

Is it just me, or is the author completely confusing the notions of privacy online with the open source movement? He mentions the comparison many times, yet the only relevant factor I can see is that Firefox happens to be open-source.

In any event, if Mozilla is caving to the tracking mafia, I will cease to use it. And if Google is behind it, I'll have to rethink their services as well. The notion that I have to tell them everything I do to use online services is preposterous. Get a business model that doesn't depend on spying.

What you mean is: "Get a business model that allows me to get free content, without advertisement and even if there are ads, do not target them in order to maximize your profits".I also do not like being tracked online. OTOH, I understand that in order for me to get so much for no money, I have to pay with something else. For me, the price is right. I agree to give up some privacy in order to be able to use a browser, web e-mail, encyclopedia and many more resources for no money. It is not really free, beca

What you mean is: "Get a business model that allows me to get free content, without advertisement and even if there are ads, do not target them in order to maximize your profits".

Actually I don't, and if you don't mind I'll write my own lines.

I also do not like being tracked online. OTOH, I understand that in order for me to get so much for no money, I have to pay with something else.

Yep. Very much like ad-driven content on TV. Critical difference: *My TV doesn't spy on me.*

I'm fine with ads. Counter to your incorrect assertion, I don't even use ad block. I'm fine with targeted ads based on what a company is able to learn about me from my interactions *with them*. What I don't want them doing is spying on what I do online when I'm not using their service.

First of all, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. What I meant is that the consequence of what you said, is what wrote in my OP. If I came out a bit condescending, my apologies.I agree that there is a difference between ads and tracking behavior, however my main point stands: Everyone of us gets to choose what trade-off he accepts for the services he uses.I use free services knowing that they track what I do. OTOH, since I don't want them to know everything about me, I choose what information I divulg

however my main point stands: Everyone of us gets to choose what trade-off he accepts for the services he uses.

Ah, but do we? Can I turn on cookies but prevent sites from using each others' cookies? I'm fine with that trade-off on a company-by-company basis. I'm not fine with every website knowing everywhere I've ever been. And I don't want to make a decision between giving every site my full identity *or* turning off cookies altogether, making the web a pain in the ass to use.

If someone goes on Facebook and writes everything they do, including their name, social status and underwear color - surprise, someone will collect this info.

Correct, which is why my facebook profile is very generic. That's also not my beef. My issue is that if I go to xyz.com an

Why the hell is the COO of Canonical making news articles, doesn't he have a job to do? That's a serious conflict of interest in my opinion.

Regardless he's completely wrong. He cites Mozilla doing smart business where Ubuntu isn't, catering to the advertising crowd. Well guess what's quickly being replaced by Chrome.

The guy simply doesn't have a clue. He cites Red Hat licensing being better then the company he works for. I really don't understand why Mark would put this guy in such a high position so he can then simply shit on the company.

Why the hell is the COO of Canonical making news articles, doesn't he have a job to do? That's a serious conflict of interest in my opinion.

I find the suggestion that public figures and business leaders should have an opinion-ectomy on Day 1 completely absurd.

I realise that I'm in the minority on this, but I don't buy the whole 'never admit weakness' thing. If a football quarterback admits that his team's got a weak mid-field, he's not saying anything people don't already know. He's just being honest about the situation. Saying so won't make it weaker.

(Now if he starts telling secrets, like 'Joe's going in for surgery after Sunday's game...' we

Probably because Mark is just like him, he is a millionaire after all, went to space, a charitable man doesn't buy space trip, It's pretty clear that Mark wants to Embrace+Extend+Ensomething linux and maybe the whole of open source.

He's not a fool, he saw a chance flying under MS radar. MS ans Apple are too determined to beat Free, why wouldn't they? Free has little over a 1% penetration on the desktop, for all that matters the battle has already been won. But Mark saw potential and decided to used his mo

They aren't exactly an open source company, but a company that has bought the prior commercial sponsors of open source packages. In many cases they then proceeded to bungle community interaction and knock some of the appeal off the original technologies among many decision makers.

He says that pressure from Google convinced FSF to not "close the ASP loophole", but that's not how it was.

FSF wanted to close the ASP loophole (by putting the Affero clause into GPLv3), but many software developers and many companies were against this.

This left FSF with the choice of producing their ideal licence, and few people using it, or producing a licence that was an improvement compared to GPLv2, and more people using it.

The licence exists to give freedom to users and to protect distributors from patent attacks. It can't do these things if no one uses it! So FSF reluctantly left the Affero clause out of GPLv3.

Same goes for the patent clause. FSF could have put a waaay broader patent grant into GPLv3, but then the patent holders simply wouldn't distribute any GPLv3'd software.

Instead, FSF started with GPLv2 and looked at every section where they could get more freedom and more protections for the distributors and the users, while ensuring that it would be used by software projects and that companies would distribute GPLv3 software. That's what it means to be pragmatic.

(Selling out your users is completely different and shouldn't be called "pragmatic")

He says that pressure from Google convinced FSF to not "close the ASP loophole", but that's not how it was.

Yeah, I have a hard time picturing Stallman's organization bowing to pressure from anyone, especially a major corporation.

Instead, FSF started with GPLv2 and looked at every section where they could get more freedom and more protections for the distributors and the users, while ensuring that it would be used by software projects and that companies would distribute GPLv3 software. That's what it means to be pragmatic.

That sounds more like the FSF I know. I don't often describe them as pragmatic, but given the choice between believing the story that they chose to write a license more devs would use, or believing the story that they bowed to pressure from one big corporation, the former seems about 1000x more plausible.

This left FSF with the choice of producing their ideal licence, and few people using it, or producing a licence that was an improvement compared to GPLv2, and more people using it.

Not to mention that it isn't an either-or. They DID create both the GPLv3 and the AGPLv3. I also think a large influence was the wish that people continue to use the "or any later version" on GPL code. The more radically you altered it, the more likely people would start creating "GPLv2 only" or "GPLv3 only" code. Anything people would consider a mass relicensing of their code rather that an upgraded GPL would kill all trust in future GPL versions.

Once again, this conflates free as in beer with free as in freedom. Few of us would begrudge others the opportunity to make money. That's not the same thing as parting out our privacy. And if we do as he suggests, adopt the so-called "reasonable" position in the middle, then you can be quite sure our opponents will take that as our position and further demand to meet in the middle.

I don't know that we have more freedom today or less with tracking. More effective and targeting advertising may mean less advertising and less obtrusive advertising. You remember what the web was like in 1998? Or for that matter what television is like today? Untargetted advertising requires far more advertising for the same bang for the buck.

Heck I have mixed feeling about anonymity on the web. In the late 1980s and early 1990s when people all had real name accounts that tied to their workplaces you

Companies have the right to offer their goods and services on the internet. They do not, however, have the right to force me to help them sell it to their customers (the customers here are the advertisers, not the users of Firefox or any other software). It is not my responsibility to help them prop up a broken, evil business model that can only succeed by taking away my choice to be tracked or not.

When advertisers pay me to watch their crap, I might consider it, if the pay is high enough. Until then, it is up to me what I watch and who tracks me watching it.

Since when are company's customer's advertisers when they are offering products? Advertisers are customers for free websites like this one, and vendors to pay ones. I think the least you could do is work your analogy to the point it makes sense and not conflate two different relationships.

""Like it or not, commercial open source companies are still companies, and the economics of the online world have everything to do with their present and their future."

Sure, the economies of the online world have everything to do with their present and future, which is PRECISELY why we can allow them to be spoiled. We have two choices, THE right way (and there is only one when it comes to freedom and openness, with honesty and well, openness), or the wrong way. Compromises are like bad apples, they spoil the whole barrel.

We can find a solution to anything, but it is not by sacrificing our morals. Don't want to tell me what your doing by tracking me? Not in the spirit of open source; and you can go to hell, where your sins belong.

We have two choices, THE right way (and there is only one when it comes to freedom and openness, with honesty and well, openness), or the wrong way. Compromises are like bad apples, they spoil the whole barrel.

I looked up the phrase three edged sword, and it seems to mean your side, their side, and the truth. Are you implying I have my own side, which isn't the truth? Because, that is the only side I am on. In fact, that was that I was saying, there is only the truth, and anything else is not the truth, i.e. wrong.

Truth is a wave function, you never know how it will collapse. There are as many truths as there are observers and if you think you've collapsed it you haven't dug enough. Unless you are omniscient, but then you can force it to collapse to your truth using omnipotence.

TFA is wrong, Mozilla has not the right or capability to keep me from using FF in any way I want.I compiled my OS & all the programs on it. Perhaps some FF users imagine themselves under the thumb of Mozilla?

Firefox is open source. If Mozilla refuses to add important features we want, me (or someone like me), will make them available to you in source and binary forms.

Everyone just chill out. If Mozilla is stupid enough to force this crap on its users, competitors will spring up instantly that offer e

In May, Mozilla engineer Dan Witte proposed a mechanism that caused cookies to automatically expire when a user closed his or her Web browser. (By comparison, most tracking cookies last for years). It only affected tracking cookies—not cookies that websites use to remember users' passwords or shopping-cart information.

This is already pretty darn easy to accomplish in Firefox. Go it "Edit : Preferences : privacy." Uncheck "accept third-party cookies." Select "Keep until: I close Firefox." Under "exceptions," check "allow" for any sites that you frequently visit and want to stay logged in to between sessions.

I don't mind surrendering a little privacy to corporations if they're willing to pay for it. That's what I'm doing when I use the preferred customer mechanism at the supermarket. That's what I'm doing when I get a magazine subscription for much less than the newsstand price. The problem with online advertisers is that they shoot themselves in the foot with their unrealistic expectations. They expect me to give them my information without any economic reward. They expect me to tolerate animated ads that distract me from the text I'm trying to read. Given that their behavior is so unreasonable, I'm willing to take the time to install adblock plus and configure firefox to reject cookies that aren't on my whitelist.

"Go it "Edit : Preferences : privacy." Uncheck "accept third-party cookies." Select "Keep until: I close Firefox." Under "exceptions," check "allow" for any sites that you frequently visit and want to stay logged in to between sessions."

Instead, configure cookies only until you close Firefox, and install the Cookie Monster extension. That way, whitelisting a site is done with just a click.

Because end-users aren't the only ones with rights and needs online, a point Luis Villa elegantly made years ago. It's not a one-way, free-for-all for end-users. Advertisers, developers and enterprises who employ end-users among others all factor into Mozilla's freedom calculus. Or should.

It seems like Luis Villa elegantly made just about the opposite point: in a world where GPL and other things intended to help end-users are increasingly playing into the hands of intermediate users, we should bring the rights back to the end-users. "I remain interested in the problem, though, since in the end I'm much more interested in the freedoms of users than the freedoms of sysadmins." Nowhere in Villa's article does he even mention the needs of advertisers, developers, or employers of end-users (tho

Sam Dean, who wrote the original article for OStatic was a bit incorrect in his definitions, "Like it or not, commercial open source companies are still companies, and the economics of the online world have everything to do with their present and their future" which got quoted in the summary on/. But if you read the article by " commercial open source companies" he means advertisers not companies releasing open source software to sell a support agreement or a commercial licensed version or..... The poin

A corporation is there to serve my interests, if I have interest in it. They are a fictional entity created for monetary gain. They are NOT equivalent to a person, and NEVER should they be. When corporations start defining what we the people can do then they are overstepping their boundaries. I firmly believe the internet is there for the sole purpose of serving its users, nothing more.

Lynx had this feature back in 1997, and it was enabled by default. When you first visited a site that had cookies, it would ask you if you wanted to add that site to the white list. ((A) to accept cookies 'always')

I'm pretty sure that Netscape also had white lists for cookies, the last time I checked.

They're a company not a charity, it will be easier for them to succeed if they "limit the openess of the web," and the have rights too.

That sounds like three (or really two) reasons why commercial open source compaies have interests that may be counter to ours. That does -not- sound like it's a good reason we should be happy about it when those interests conflict, nor do they sound like reasons to get on board with things like advertiser tracking.

This "burn commercial open source companies on the stake" mantra is getting a bit tiresome.In the end, these companies are usually very involved in their respective communities and usually invest a lot of money in open source software development.

Just like you might have an annoying hot-shot developer in your community it might be worth the trouble or not. However, just mindlessly bashing all companies just because they might have interests that conflict is just a little over the top.

As a 49 yo grandmother, feminist and programmer of 20 years (assembly, C) I find this offensive.

Welcome to the Internet, where October 2007 was "years ago" and being over 40 and able to program assembly makes you a "greybeard". I am sure those guys at Mozilla are referring to their own grandmother's generation, however, the distinction would be subtle to them.

Welcome to the Internet, where October 2007 was "years ago" and being over 40 and able to program assembly makes you a "greybeard". I am sure those guys at Mozilla are referring to their own grandmother's generation, however, the distinction would be subtle to them.

Dude, I don't even remember 2007 anymore. There's no need for the double quotes around years ago.

To be fair, you are not the mean, median, or mode grandmother. Nor anywhere within several standard deviations of one...

But yes, the article should probably just have said "just about anyone" instead of "grandmother". I would bet that the average kid using the Web would have a harder time with do not track mechanisms than the average grandmother, if nothing else. For one thing, the kid doesn't even understand what the problem is...

No, but I am a mathematician and physicist by training with some so-so knowledge of statistics (not enough to do original research, but enough to do error analysis on my experiments, say).

> All those buzzwords you used in your failed attempt to look smart refer to measurable> numeric characteristics

Yes, and "computed experience" is not all that hard to define (in various ways, agreed) and then measure. And given pretty much any reasonable definition and measurement technique my statement would be true. Now you can accuse me of being insufficiently pedantic in that I didn't define such a measurement technique, but that's where the fact that in this case it really doesn't matter much comes in.

> But saying Mr X is the mode of Lalaland is just retarded.

When measuring somewhat imprecise quantities (like "computer experience"; this is less applicable to salaries) it's common to deal with the imprecision by binning (e.g. instead of asking people for the exact to-the-second amount of time they've programmed in C, whicih they couldn't tell you if they tried, you ask them for the number of years, possibly with some predefined non-single-year ranges). At which point it does in fact make sense to speak of the mode of the resulting distribution.

But as an aside, you could in fact talk about the modal salary. It's just not a very useful measure when binned at the 1 cent level, so no one does.

Again, I could have been more pedantic and said "The amount of computer experience you have is likely several standard deviations away from any of the mean, median, or mode amounts of computer experience in the population of grandmothers in the United States in the year 2010." But _that_ would have sounded pretentious.;)

"Panties" is current nomenclature in South East Asia; and the term is regularly used to describe underwear of both genders.

The OP comment about "social prototypes" is an interesting and relevant turn of phrase; nothing in what was written was sexist; but seemed to set you off. I thought that divining offensive comments in throw away lines, was 1970s post publication of "The Female Eunuch", which was oh.... about 40 years ago.

Just do a survey of 10000 grandmothers, how many will be "programmer of 20 years, assembly and C". If Apple targeted people like you they'd go out of business.

I think it's time to use great-grandmothers as the stereotype now. While my mother (a 63 year old grandmother) isn't a programmer, she did learn (and forgot) Pascal and Prolog long ago. And she's married to a programmer of 40 years. I have a friend who's mother is both a programmer and a grandmother.

The demographic of programming grandparents is growing rapidly, because second generation nerds are having kids now.

I find the fact that you're 49 year old grandmother to mean that you either got pregnant in school, or your daughter did, maybe one of you should have been taught about safe sex, or you're just lying about your age, a common trait among women. Face it you're old.

Older than you seem to think. It is possible to have graduated from university by the time you're 24. Still too young for kids if you ask me, but it's not all that uncommon, nor nearly as irresponsible as you suggest it is.

24-25 is biologically pretty much the later end of optimum time to have first kids - waiting until 30+ for your first kid is due to quite unnatural social pressure and is not really that good to the kid and the family in many different aspects.

Is the poster seriously claiming that a 49 year old grandmother implies some problem with safe sex or lying about age?? It seems really, really ridiculous to me. You could say that about a 35-year old grandmother, but not for this age.

24-25 is biologically pretty much the later end of optimum time to have first kids - waiting until 30+ for your first kid is due to quite unnatural social pressure and is not really that good to the kid and the family in many different aspects.

That's nonsense. 30 is a perfectly fine age for having kids. And recent research showed that women who have kids late end up happier than women who don't have kids at all, who in turn end are still happier than women who have their kids early. And I'd say a happy mom is a pretty big factor in what's good for the family and the children.

Sure, you're biologically perfectly capable of having children when you're 20, but are you psychologically equipped to raise them properly? IMO 24-25 is the early end of the

It's pretty straightforward, really. There's this "progressive" tendency to try to paint companies as faceless, soulless lifesuckers draining all that is meaningful from existence when in reality, it's just people trying to get things done to make a living.

I like poking holes in the "progressive" attempts at class welfare.

I think it's more a tendency to paint them as faceless, soulless legal entities, some of which sometimes do the bad shit that they actually do in fact do. You can't really deny, say, that Firestone and Ford intentionally let people die because it was cheaper than issuing recalls or that BP ignored warnings that resulted in that ecologically catastrophic oil spill, or that our elections are basically bought and sold these days by large corporations, so instead you accuse progressives of class warfare.

It's pretty straightforward, really. There's this "progressive" tendency to try to paint companies as faceless, soulless lifesuckers draining all that is meaningful from existence when in reality, it's just people trying to get things done to make a living.

Companies are faceless and soulless, on the account of being fictional legal entities rather than human (or comparable) beings. They also tend to be the nastier the bigger they become, since any individual person - who, presumably, does have a face and s

Anonymity is free speech. Let's be honest: truly free speech will never be a reality. Even if no one can legally convict you for anything you say, that doesn't mean there isn't a social backlash you'll have to face. If you work for a company and feels the need to call your boss a moron, ok. There will be consequences, though, and probably not great ones, from your point of view. Now we might say it's only fair and natural that you have to deal with the consequences of what you say, but if something - anythi